France

Amazing Roundabouts – 1

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Roundabouts in Europe are amazing things!

But first, what is a roundabout?  Depending on where you live they are also known as rotaries, traffic circles, Kreisverkehr (German), Rotonda (Spanish), or Rond-Point (French).  So I hope I don’t I need any more explanation than that!

According to Wikipedia, there are examples that date back to the 1700’s. But using the Google NGram viewer, I found the word “roundabout” first came into print around 1576.

But this is not a history lesson – it is a blog post!  The key point is that especially in Europe roundabouts are typically places for the villages and communities to install truly breathtaking artwork.

I took this snap of a roundabout just outside of the village of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, buried deep within the Savoie region of France:

This village is famous for Opinel knives, not for bicycles – but many bicycle races do pass through this village every year, so perhaps that was the motivation for this piece?

The Incredible Legacy of Vauban

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Vauban left an amazing, amazing legacy all over France which you can visit today.

First things first.  This is Vauban:


Or, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauben,who was a military man in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in France, and he directed what at the time would be the equivalent of today’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  He travelled around the border of France, constructing fortifications that were truly mind-blowing.

Case in point: there is the small village named Brisach Neuf in Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, and he transformed it into an amazing fortified jewel, which unfortunately you can only truly appreciate from the air:

And indeed, you’ll appreciate this even more when you see the original map of the village and fortifications that he created:

In this arial photograph, if you look at the village center just north of the town square, this church he also created is visible:

But the amazing part is the not paved area of the village, but the extremely complicated jewel structure of moats and barriers and fortifications that surround the village,

With dozens upon dozens of underground bunkers like this one.

Covered pedestrian bridge in Alsace

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Do you like to see people or do you like to see beautiful things?

The reason for this question has to do with the difference between North and South Europe.

In South Europe, you will see neighborhoods filled with people, sitting outside, talking, playing various bowling games or cards.  But you aren’t likely to see neighborhoods filled with modern embellishments paid for by the residents.

But in North Europe, particularly in the French Region of Alsace, you will see NO ONE.  Not a single person! But what you will see in these empty neighborhoods are some beautiful ornaments, such as this covered wooden pedestrian bridge that I photographed somewhere in Alsace:

Great inventions – 1

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When you travel around to enough countries, you’ll often find that one country has an invention or system that is so stunningly good, you immediately wonder why other places don’t adopt it.

For me, the traffic light system in France is one of these incredible inventions.

The traffic lights in France have the usual red/yellow/green lights mounted high on a post, just as you’ll find in just about every country. But in addition, there are little red and green lights mounted lower on the pole, just at the eyeball height of drivers, as you can see here:

It means when you are stopped at a light, you don’t need to strain your neck or lean forward – you can keep your body in the driving posture and just look straight ahead at these little lights.

BRILLIANT!

Dijon Mystery Houses

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The French village of Dijon, nestled in the Bourgogne region of France, is not only famous for its mustard, but it’s a fantastic and large medieval city, filled with buildings dating back many centuries.

But it’s also the source of a real mystery for me.  If you walk around this huge town and admire the architecture, you’ll find that it is almost exclusively buildings made of stone.  But from time to time you’ll see something like this:

Or this

Which are wood “half-timbered” or Fachwerk houses.

Although these types of buildings are the de facto standard in Eastern France, Germany, and Northern Switzerland – why are are few of them here?  And why are they interspersed so spartanly in what are otherwise stone buildings?

It’s one of the many mysteries on my list that I hope to clarify someday!

Medieval village of knives

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Deep within France, just inside a French national volcanic park, is the medieval village of Thiers:

Manufaccturing more than 90% of all cutlery sold in France, the artisans have made this village not just the knife capital of France, but truly the knife capital of the world:

The village is home to literally dozens upon dozens upon dozens of shops run by knifemakers.  The shop shown above sells custom handmade knives made by a family whose been living here and doing this for six generations!

So it was really exciting and unique for me to practice my French and purchase a pocketknife here, with handles made of Brazilian rosewood:

Interestingly, the inhabitants of this village are something of a language enclave, speaking a language (Auvergnat) derived from Langue d’Oc, one time quite important but now mostly extinct in France.

Black Church

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Probably not what you are thinking when you read the title.

Here is a snap of the famous Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption of Clarement-Ferrand, in the city of the same name, in France:

What’s absolutely amazing about this cathedral is its color.  Claremont-Ferrand sits in an area of France filled with volcanoes, and the cathedral is build with black lava stone.

It’s a pretty impressive sight!

Even more interesting than the church are the people, many of whom do not speak French, but rather a descendant of the old and nearly extinct Lang d’Oc language.

Cité de Carcasonne

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Anyway touring around Southern France or travelling by car to Barcelona usually finds time to stop here, the ancient medieval UNESCO site known as the Cité de Carcasonne:

It’s a truly massive fortified city high on a hill, complete with moats

As well as impressive Gothic cathedrals

If you are here and have the time, to me a more interesting and more wonderful place is this site at which it’s been speculated that hidden proof was discovered about Jesus not being crucified, but rather moving to France with his wife, Mary Magdelene:

Alemanic rituals of Switzerland, Southern Germany and France

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Switzerland, Southern Germany as well as the eastern Alsacian region of France are home to a more evolved form of the German language, called Alemanic. And this region is also filled with tiny medieval villages, some of them still having impressive city walls like Riquewihr in France:

Inside of the village you’ll often find public fountains, which until quite recently supplied the residents with drinking water:

But the most interesting bit are the yearly celebrations such as Faschtnacht, planned for months in advance by the locals and usually involving street festivals and parades:

Unbelievably, in many of these towns the specific characters in the parade and even the costumes themselves are hundreds of years old, each accompanied by elaborate stories and detailed historical myths.

Bubble Architecture – 2

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In a recent post I’ve talked about a trend I’ve seen – particularly in France, but France is not alone – to enclose historic buildings in glass facades.  I call it bubble architecture.

If done right, it can compliment the existing architecture.

If done wrong, it can be an ugly eyesore, as this example in Chalons-en-Champagne shows:

In this case, several streets were enclosed in glass and turned into an indoor shopping center.

As global warming continues to slowly increase just under the threshold where it would have triggered immediate reactions from us, humans will slowly begin to adjust their environment in subtle ways. In 50 years, it is likely the entire city center will be enclosed in a dome, and we humans will have barely noticed how this “new normal” will have come into being. Like a frog being slowly boiled in water.

 

Amazing pilgrimage site – Lourdes and UFO’s

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I’ve long been fascinated with pilgrims and their pilgrimages – people who are so devout as to make substantial investments of time and money and effort to visit religious sites.

Recently I visited arguably the oldest pilgrimage destination in the western world, and you can see my pictures here: Santiago de Compostela.  It’s tucked into a remote corner of Spain, and even today it requires quite some time and effort to reach.

And this is an equally famous pilgrimage destination, Lourdes:

Just like Santiago de Compostella, Lourdes is in a very remote section of France. Even with an automobile, it is very difficult and time-consuming to reach.

As I usually do, I visited during the off season, in the middle of winter.  Except for one family, I was alone in the entire complex which has grown in size to host tens of thousands of visitors each day. The pious believe that the spring water that flows out of a cave is holy and can cure illness – and it’s amazing to see the huge engineering effort, in which this water is diverted into channels so that the pilgrims have easy access. For a one euro donation you can buy a little glass water bottle.

A connection with UFO’s?

What I find most fascinating about Lourdes is the story of the apparition.  In 1858 a peasant girl reported seeing a number of apparitions of a woman. Here’s the amazing part: she never attributed the apparitions to Christian figures or the Virgin Mary; she only reported seeing an apparition.  It was other people in the village who assumed that what she saw was the Virgin Mary.

A few years later, in Portugal, three children also reported seeing the apparition of a woman; like the apparition at Lourdes, this was later attributed to the Virgin Mary (Our Lady of Fatima).

So . . . could it be that the peasant girl in Lourdes, and later the three children in Portugal, witnessed something extraterrestrial in origin – or perhaps a time traveller from the future?  Some people believe so, and you can read more about it here.

Église Saint-Paul de Strasbourg

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StrasbourgChurch

If you’ve been to Strasbourg, then you know how it is. The cathedral is big and imposing and it stands in the center of the city and you can visit it. It’s surrounded by outdoor coffee shops where you can sit and look up at it, and if you can manage to hail a waiter you can drink coffee and smell the strong cigarette smell coming from other patrons who sit and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. But you can’t watch the carabinieri stroll by because this is France not Italy.

OK, I’m not Hemingway, and this is not that cathedral. This is the Church of St. Paul. In any other city, this would would be the cathedral – but here it lives among the ranks of the SCHNN (smaller churches hardly nobody notices) because it is eclipsed by the much bigger cathedral.